Hannibal S03E05: It's been a long while since I last gesticulated and yelled at a TV quite so enthusiastically.

Secret Wars #this week: I don't think I've ever been so embarrassed for Doom as I feel reading this series. It's like that time (Pre-Crisis, I think) when Lex was in this other planet and he saved that world and made everything better by sciencing the shit out of everything at hand, and everybody loved him and made statues of thing, and they renamed the planet Lexia (I think? that sounds weird even by Pre-Crisis standards, but could be right, and I'm too amused by the idea to google and risk disappointment). Anyway, Lex was basically *it*, and yet he felt unfulfilled (gee, I wonder why), and when he found a cache of old, even-more-advanced technology, he used it to build a supersuit (the one made by Darkseid in post-crisis Superman/Batman, when he went crazy in a different way) that he field-tested by destroying things he had built/saved himself (again, I might be wrong, but that's how I remember it), just to be able to kill Superman.

And when they fought, he ended up destroying the planet, because of course.

ETA: See astolat's comment below for more (and more accurate) details on that wonderful bit of Silver Age crack.

First, a billion dollars is peanuts to Lex Luthor. The man has built for himself private space stations *multiple* times. Him asking for just a billion makes absolutely no sense.

Second, a financial crisis wasn't likely to hit somebody, let's not mince words here, who sold their computer and software systems to most major corporations in the world and has a long history of building backdoors in his devices.

Third, and perhaps just as important, none of the very few people who are nearly as smart as Lex are very much focused on amassing money and power. That is because they aren't, in fact, quite as smart as he is.

Lex Luthor saw the financial crisis coming. Lex Luthor rearranged his legal and illegal investments to best take advantage of it. Lex Luthor triggered it when he was ready.

Lex Luthor does something like this every few years to depress market values and buy whatever he wants on the cheap. Then he lets the market rise again, consolidates what he wants to keep and sells the rest, and then he does everything again.

Lex Luthor has, at any point in time, as much wealth as he wants to. He can't really let himself feel too good about systematically taking money from an entire planet of barely sentient "businesspeople," and he wouldn't dedicate so much time to this if he hadn't his war with Superman and all the interesting things he can do to him with the judicious application of wealth and power.